Ghost
by Clarity1
Summary: A...ahem...'recurring minor character'? reflects on their life, death, and rebirth. And it's not who you think. Trust me on this one.


Title: Ghost  
  
Author: Clarity  
  
Rating: Oh, maybe PG, just for a little language  
  
Pairing: None. Unless you have a _really_ twisted imagination.  
  
Disclaimer: Well, Phil, Ronnie, and Kane are my morally challanged little scumbags, but the person telling the story, the situation they find themselves in, and everyone else they make reference to belong to Joss Whedon and crew. I'm just borrowing, and hey, you said you were done with them!  
  
Summary: A...ahem...'recurring minor character' reflects on their life, death, and rebirth. And I don't care who you think it is, it isn't. Trust me on this one.  
  
Author's Note: I really don't know where this came from. It's officially the weirdest thing I've ever written. I think I kind of like it. Seeing as how I wrote it all in about three hours (got the idea in church at 5:30, started at eight, finished at eleven), I may hate it tomorrow, but for now it seems kind of cool to me. Let me know if you feel the same.  
  
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Once upon a time, I was a living battleground.  
  
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In the entire history of the universe, nothing has ever been purely evil or purely good. Those that try to deny it simply allow one side of their selves to conquer the other. Conquer, but not destroy, and this is important, because even then they fight within themselves. And others hide, cover shady business dealings with fronts of fronts, create a struggle on paper that is somehow less objectionable for its lack of physical bruising. But oh, once, in the days when I lived and thrived and grew and prospered, my struggles were long and bloody and the good and evil within me waxed and waned more quickly and widely than the moon.  
  
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I've been called evil. My name once meant destruction and death, I was hated and cursed and feared and avoided at all costs by those who knew what I really was. Oh, you have no concept of the power of it, knowing that your very name is enough to terrify people half a world away. I know that almost everyone I've ever touched has blamed me in some way for their downfalls, and I don't deny it. I was, I am, I was half evil. I have been the reason for death upon death, I have been the source of all manner of misery. If destruction is evil, and destruction is the definition of evil, then I have done more evil in my life than most humans could conceive of.  
  
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I called my hordes of vampires and demons to myself with the scent of the black majicks of my life's blood, pumped out in waves of evil by my cruel heart. But what they forget, those that only see my darkness, is that I brought good too. I destroyed, and then I created, and I created before I destroyed. From death springs birth. Happiness without misery is nothing at all. To build again I first had to level what had come before. My yin led to my yang which brought about my yin yet again. They curse me, and they don't see what I've given them.  
  
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Yes, I understand the concept of yin and yang. I lived in Southern California, how could I not? All these religions that spring up and last for thousands of years, and somehow they've all ended up here, and I think I must have used them all for one thing or another. If all I'd ever been was death and destruction, I would have destroyed myself much, much sooner. I nearly did anyway, more than once, I almost let the Hellmouth spring open and pour out devastation until there was no good left to prey on and everything was simply barren. But I did not. And if I were only good, if I had been, it all would have stagnated. I would have lived and died like I was in that movie about the Stepford wives, everything about me perfect so that nothing ever tried to change for the better. If I were purely good, I never would really have lived at all. And I wanted to live! Survival, the most basic drive in everything human, the only thing I've ever really wanted.  
  
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And so not only did I live, but I reveled in it. I felt passion on the dark dance floor late at night, and peace in the sunset over the beach, and the thrill of a hunt and a kill, and curiosity every time something new came by. And I felt greed, and I felt anger, and I felt arrogance. I flaunted the beauty of my sunny surface, and I bragged silently simply by possessing the power in my dark underbelly. I was bad, I was good, I was cruel, I was kind. I promised things I could never give, taunted with glimpses of what I would never relinquish. And I sheltered and comforted and saved people who never even realized I had a hand in their salvation. At times I feared for my life, feared that I'd managed to destroy myself in a way no outside force had ever accomplished. And always, always, I mustered my forces for my own survival.  
  
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That is, I always managed to save myself until now. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Gods, how simple they pretend it is! My whole life I've been divided, been good and evil and everything in between, and I made it, and it wasn't in spite of my division, it was because of it. My darkness and my light have always warred, and every time one won the other fought back just a little harder, and somehow that perpetual struggle produced enough power on both sides to keep all of me alive. Foolish me, to think that would always be the case.  
  
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I was doomed far before my actual death. That much I realized, but I'd thought there might be some salvation. I'd thought my own good could rescue me from my darkness yet again, the way it always had, and therein lies the problem. It wasn't my darkness that was doing the fighting, and not all of the good had yet become my own. The darkness was older and stronger than me. Instead of coming to my call and submitting to my balance, it overpowered me for its own ends, in a huge cosmic war that barely blinked at my little microcosm. And the good, that damned good responded too damn quickly! My light, my creations, everything I've strengthened and taught and given life, it wasn't enough to fight this evil that had decided to use me for its own battle. So this bigger war, this worldwide struggle, it flooded me with tools for the light to join my own, enough to drown me, too many to make mine, too powerful and too independent and too attached to their origins to become part of me. And they fought and they left swathes of destruction in their wake that there wasn't time for the foreign light to fix, and all I could think to do was get rid of everything not involved in this battle bigger than I was, concentrate on surviving, and mend the damage later.  
  
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How was I to know what would happen? I wasn't omniscient! I was never omnipotent! I was just too damn confident in my ability to affect what was mine, too damn sure I could put myself back together in the end. And instead I lost everything that had ever made any light give a damn about me, because pure light's too selfless to care about itself, and too good to care about darkness, and I'd stripped away all the gray I could get to. And suddenly I wasn't the evil being who required casualties of war to keep its balance in the world, I was a casualty of war to help balance the world. Suddenly all I am is a ghost a memory and a link between the people that knew me and curse me still, human and demon alike. Suddenly all I can do is lay here and be nothing.  
  
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Did you know that the dead aren't good or evil? I used to be both, so powerfully I sometimes thought I would tear myself apart, and now I'm neither and nothing. I can't be good or evil any more if there's nothing left of me to be either. I've been abandoned and it's killed me. My light has fled, my evil is destroyed, my body collapsed in on itself, my black heart crushed to nothing. So now my physical self nothing more than fodder for an examination by people who didn't know me by more than name, and a target for the gloating of people who did. And if the manner of my death suggests 'buried alive', well, my grave marker fell in after me, and now everything I ever was is just plain gone.  
  
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I want to live again, damnit! I could have, I should have lived forever, or so long as the distinction made next to no difference. I want to gather back my not-quite-light and my not-quite-dark, I want to rebuild myself. I want to nurture good and foment evil and dance with it and run with it and scream with it and hum all over just with the electric energy of my own existence, the way I used to. I am still here, even if I'm nothing more than the breath of a shadow of an idea, for now I can still remember what I used to be, but for how long? How long until my light finds itself a new corner of the world to shine in, my dark another place to lurk, and all that's left of me is an inaudible voice crying out in the wilderness? How long before something completely new intrudes upon even that and throws me out of this place that for now at least is still mine to plant its own soul?  
  
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Some of the Eastern religions say that self is a candle flame, forever changing, never constant. In that case, my wick's been removed, bit by bit, and right now I'm just a tiny spark hanging in the middle of nothing. In a split cosmic instant I'll burn out. I'm here now because I've got a little tie left with some of what I used to be, a bit of strand, a bit of fuel, but I'm about to die. I don't want to die! I don't deserve to die! I was never as bad as you claimed me to be! I gave you a Christmas present four years ago, remember? Doesn't that mean anything? God? I'm praying to you, because this wasn't supposed to happen.   
  
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I don't even know what I am any more. There is no one and nothing left for me to own or belong to, so how can I be at all? I used to be something real, I used to be something that /i instead of the echo of the wish that it still was. And I want to be again, because that's all that's left, that's the tiny bit of wick remaining to me, the desire that what I was still existed. The first split instant that no one remembers they want me, the instant that's gone, so am I. And the fact that I'm starting to feel resigned to it means it's even sooner.  
  
iI WISH I COULD LIVE AGAIN!!!br  
  
"Do you really now? Well, you do owe me terribly for taking my two best vengeance demons from me...but then, you'll never be able to pay me back like this, now, will you? And you certainly do count as one scorned. So I suppose I should say, done."  
  
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What? I don't understand. Someone was there, for a minute, amidst my rubble and wreckage, and they spoke to me. They spoke to me. Not even when I was alive did anyone bother to address me directly, there was too much of me to speak to, but now someone chooses to? Now, when I'm dead anyway?  
  
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Huh? What's this?  
  
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"Yeah, Phil, you're right, it's a serious windfall. Perfect positioning on the oceanfront, I can't believe how cheap the real estate went for, massive sinkhole or not."  
  
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"Well, maybe that's because no one else could afford the millions of tons of gravel it's going to take to fill this thing if they weren't saving a truckload of cash by burying a few thousand canisters of nuclear waste in it all. Damn, this used to be a big town!"  
  
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"Eh, morals. Crime is money, and anyway, that deep down, who's going to dig it up? It's perfect, the hole's already there, we don't have to do a thing except for cover it up. Slap up a couple monumental resorts with beachfront property, huge swimming pools, and swans, and ladidah, SoCal's newest vacation hotspot is born. We can't loose!"  
  
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"I'm not convinced, Phil..."  
  
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"Hold on, Ronnie. I'd like to hear more."  
  
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"Well, for starters, we're going to build more gigantic resorts than you could shake a stick at, and since Kane's company's doing the building it'll be cheaper for us than it could ever be individually for any of the big resort names. We'll be able to sell the hotels to them, fully built, for way more than we paid, but way less than they'd have to if they first wanted to buy the land, then work from scratch. Meanwhile, we subcontract strip malls all over, sell them off, and keep the utilities. So we're still making constant money on the place, after the initial few billion we'll pull down just by selling it all off, but if anyone ever does find the junk, it's not our problem, 'cause we don't own the land anymore! Like I said, it's totally a sure thing."  
  
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"You know something? I think I like it."  
  
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"You would, Kane. But I'd still like to ask some questions about--"  
  
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I've stopped listening.  
  
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My God! It's too good to be true. I'm not going to turn into a ghost town, nothing but wind blowing past buildings that aren't there anymore in the shadows of the people that used to make it real. I'm going to have people again. Nuclear waste, well, it's not as good as a Hellmouth for imbuing things with oddities. It couldn't have given me a real, sentient personality, the kind it takes most cities and towns centuries upon centuries of history to build up, the kind even nations take years to learn. When I was first founded, it couldn't have made me into so much more than the sum of my parts that I could--just barely---survive them abandoning me long enough to be reborn. And, all right, the Hellmouth couldn't do that much either. Paris would never be so desperately fading after only a few months. But it was enough. I'm going to be fixed. Renamed, repeopled, but /i! And the nuclear waste will definitely be fun to play with. After all, without a dark side I'd stagnate, right? And I never really went for the whole, old money, old businesses, old men in old buildings conspiracy theory evil.  
  
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I'm going to survive after all. I'm going to dance on darkened club floors and watch the flaming sun set over the beach and mutate some people into things evil and twisted and others into things of true beauty and power. I'm not a dying candle flame, I'm a phoenix! Damn, already taken...  
  
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I never did like the name Sunnydale.  
  
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Now, go back and read it again. It makes more sense once you know who's talking. Promise. br  
  
Be honest. When did you figure it out? And did you hate it? Love it? Whether you want to sing my praises from the rooftops or threaten my life if I ever set finger to keyboard again, there's a nifty little 'review' button I beg of you to use. 


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